To illustrate the distinction between a poet's, or other artist's, old-style treatment of things The Real and the Apparent.as they seem and the philosopher's statement of them as they are, I once used an extreme, and therefore a serviceable, example; to wit, the grand Aurora fresco in the Rospigliosi palace. Here you have the childlike, artistic, and phenomenal conception of the antique poets. To them the Dawn was a joyous heroic goddess, speeding her chariot in advance of the sun-god along the clouds, while the beauteous Hours lackeying her scattered many-hued blossoms down the eastern sky. For the educated modern there is neither Aurora nor Apollo; there are no winged Hours, no flowers of diverse hues. His sun is an incandescent material sphere, alive with magnetic forces, engirt with hydrogenous flame, and made up of constituents more or less recognizable through spectrum analysis. The colors of the auroral dawn—for the poet still fondly calls it auroral—are rays from this measurable incandescence, refracted by the atmosphere and clouds, under the known conditions that have likewise put to test both the pagan and biblical legends of that prismatic nothing, the rainbow itself.[1] The stately blank-verse poem, "Orion," which the late Hengist Horne published at a farthing half a century ago, is doubtless our most imaginative rendering of the legend which
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"There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things."Keats: Lamia.
